While Mr. Trump’s path is complicated and certain to be met with court challenges, he likely will have the power to make at least some of it happen after his Jan. 20 inauguration.Alex Brandon/The Associated Press
When Donald Trump retakes the presidency, he will do so with a plan to overhaul the U.S. federal government.
Throughout his winning campaign, he vowed to purge civil servants and replace them with political loyalists, launch prosecutions of people and companies he accuses of wronging him, and make independent regulatory agencies answerable to the White House.
To Mr. Trump and his supporters, it’s all part of dismantling the “deep state” he blames for thwarting him during his previous term. And he sees it as crucial to ensuring his expansive agenda – which includes deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants and imposing tariffs on all the U.S.’s trading partners – is put into force.
“The crazy lunatics that we have, the fascists, the Marxists, the communists, the people that we have that are actually running the country,” he said in one typical stump speech, “those people are more dangerous, the enemy from within, than Russia and China.”
To his critics, this is authoritarianism, driven by a desire for revenge.
While Mr. Trump’s path is complicated and certain to be met with court challenges, he likely will have the power to make at least some of it happen after his Jan. 20 inauguration. And the consequences would be sweeping.
The civil service
On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump vowed to make every federal government employee – of which there are about two million – “fireable” by the President. Late in his previous term, he rolled out a plan to change at least 50,000 civil service jobs into political appointments, but he didn’t have time to implement it before losing re-election.
Whatever number Mr. Trump ultimately lands on, the effect would be similar: He would be able to either fire much of the bureaucracy and replace it with his loyalists, or create a threat of firing to ensure compliance with his orders.
“This is an enormous deal. What it would do in a single stroke of a pen is upend 140 years of bipartisan support for a non-partisan civil service,” said Donald Kettl, a former dean of public policy at the University of Maryland.
Currently, the vast majority of federal government employees are hired on merit and protected from arbitrary firings. Mr. Trump’s plan would at least partly revert the government to the 1800s “spoils system,” in which the President had a free hand to appoint and dismiss whomever he wanted, usually based on political allegiance.
Project 2025, a plan for Mr. Trump’s second term assembled by the Heritage Foundation think tank, includes a database of prospective political appointees vetted for their commitment to Mr. Trump’s agenda. Mr. Trump disavowed Project 2025 during the campaign but has since tapped some of its architects for powerful positions in his administration, including Russell Vought as his White House budget chief.
The effect of politicizing civil service jobs would be wide-ranging. Mr. Trump could have agencies stop enforcing laws he does not like, such as by ordering the Environmental Protection Agency to stop cracking down on polluting companies, or by allowing his pick for health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine activist, a free hand with public health programs. The federal government oversees the regulation of everything from financial markets to farms and administers programs from Medicare to Social Security.
“You don’t want political influence over the safety of the drug supply or the food supply or the transportation system,” said Teresa Gerton, president of the National Academy of Public Administration.
Mr. Trump has already mapped out how he could go about this. In October, 2020, he signed an executive order creating Schedule F, a new job classification for civil servants involved in influencing government policy. This classification would have taken away their protections against firing. The order’s architect was reportedly James Sherk, a Canadian-born adviser in Mr. Trump’s first White House.
Before the order could take effect, President Joe Biden took office and cancelled it. To impede any future attempt at reintroducing Schedule F, Mr. Biden enacted a new regulation allowing civil servants whose jobs are reclassified to keep their protections against firing. The regulation would take months for Mr. Trump to repeal, slowing him down but not stopping him.
In the meantime, he has tasked Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy with generating ideas for cutting spending and jobs via an outside advisory group called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, after Mr. Musk’s favourite cryptocurrency.
The Department of Justice, intelligence and the military
Mr. Trump is promising to use the federal government to exact retribution on a long list of people.
He has pledged to put various political opponents on trial, including Mr. Biden, Vice-President Kamala Harris and members of Congress who have investigated him – though in an interview with NBC earlier this month he said he would not appoint a special prosecutor to pursue Mr. Biden “unless I find something that I think is reasonable.” He has suggested that Mark Milley, the country’s former top military commander, should be executed. He has said he will have Google prosecuted for displaying too many negative stories about him in its search results.
To run the Department of Justice, Mr. Trump is tapping a team of loyalists. At their head is his prospective attorney-general, Pam Bondi, who backed Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election. Working under her would be Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, two of Mr. Trump’s defence lawyers at his criminal hush-money trial.
To run the FBI, Mr. Trump has picked Kash Patel, a former political staffer who himself compiled an enemies list of current and former officials in a book titled Government Gangsters.
Mark Paoletta, who is leading Mr. Trump’s Department of Justice transition, warned on social media that government lawyers must get on board with the president-elect’s agenda – including by carrying out mass deportations and pardoning rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 – or be fired.
Mr. Trump has also promised to purge the FBI, CIA and other law enforcement and intelligence agencies of people who have investigated him. And he has at various times threatened every prosecutor who led one of the four criminal prosecutions against him.
The president-elect’s choice for director of national intelligence, meanwhile, is Tulsi Gabbard. The former Democratic member of Congress blamed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for provoking Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and promoted a baseless conspiracy theory that the U.S. had secret biological weapons labs in the country.
At the Pentagon, the Mr. Trump has said he will give “woke” generals the boot. He has also talked about a range of major changes to military policy, from refusing to defend NATO allies from invasion if they fail to contribute enough to the alliance, to deploying the National Guard in cities to crack down on street crime.
Gene Moran, a retired Navy captain and former adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said firing military commanders for political reasons would likely lead to an exodus of talent that would be hard to replace.
“In a merit-based system, where uniformed people rise because of their performance over time, if they see that now only leads to a shooting gallery, they will vote with their feet and leave,” he told The Globe and Mail. “You can’t just go into the open job market and find a general, find an admiral. You have to grow them within the service.”
Even some who played top roles in Mr. Trump’s previous administration have warned about the dangers of his looming shakeup of the country’s security forces.
“That turnover and that chaos that would be created would obviously detriment the capabilities and the skills of the mission work force,” Elaine Duke, a former deputy secretary of homeland security under Mr. Trump, said at a congressional hearing this fall. Mr. Trump’s plans have “high potential to undermine effective national security policy and operations,” she said.
John Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, was even more blunt in describing Ms. Gabbard. “Given the Russian propaganda that she has espoused over the past period of time,” he told News Nation, “I think she’s a serious threat to our national security.”
Independent regulators
The U.S. currently leaves a wide range of government regulatory decisions to arm’s-length bodies. The idea is that having such rules enforced and interpreted by independent tribunals makes them less susceptible to being manipulated for partisan political purposes.
Mr. Trump, however, has promised to put at least some of these agencies directly under presidential control, including the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
The FCC regulates broadcast licences, among other things. During the election campaign, Mr. Trump threatened to have the licences of ABC, CBS and NBC revoked because he said they treated him unfairly. ABC’s transgression was fact-checking him during September’s presidential debate. NBC’s was not airing his victory speech in the Iowa caucuses.
Tom Wheeler, a former FCC chair, said giving Mr. Trump direct power over the agency would require legislation, which at least theoretically could pass Congress given Republican control of both houses. More likely, he said, was that Mr. Trump could put pressure on incoming FCC chair Brendan Carr and other Republican commissioners to do his bidding.
“You get the president of the United States on the line saying, ‘Excuse me – I appointed you, I can remove you, this is what I want you to do.’ It’s obviously a test of leadership,” Mr. Wheeler said. “You’re responsible for all of the nation’s networks, whether they be telephone networks or digital broadband networks or satellite networks.”
Mr. Carr has talked about having the FCC regulate Google and Facebook, both of which drew Mr. Trump’s ire during the campaign, when he accused them of burying conservative content. Mr. Musk’s Starlink satellite communications system is also subject to FCC regulations.
The FTC, meanwhile, is tasked with enforcing antitrust and consumer protection laws.
Politicizing the agency could lead it to make such decisions based on which companies Mr. Trump favours or disfavours. In his first term, he unsuccessfully tried to block a merger involving CNN’s parent company amid his long-running feud with the network.
In another episode during Mr. Trump’s previous White House stint, he attempted to have social media companies sued after they took steps to mitigate disinformation on mail-in ballots in the 2020 election. The FTC’s then-chair, Joseph Simons, refused to enforce Mr. Trump’s order as he contended it was outside of the agency’s jurisdiction.
Not everyone who knows Mr. Trump sees method in his efforts to shake up the executive branch. Ty Cobb, who worked as a lawyer in Mr. Trump’s White House, said the president-elect is “trying to remake government, not in a way that has any principles, but out of pure contempt for norms.”
Mr. Trump, he said, operates more out of instinct than strategy.
“Trump is totally reactive,” Mr. Cobb said in an interview. “He’s a narcissist who acts only out of self-interest and vengeance.”
